The Cosmic Ultraviolet Baryon Survey (CUBS) V: on the thermodynamic properties of the cool circumgalactic medium at z ≲ 1
ABSTRACT

This paper presents a systematic study of the photoionization and thermodynamic properties of the cool circumgalactic medium (CGM) as traced by rest-frame ultraviolet absorption lines around 26 galaxies at redshift z ≲ 1. The study utilizes both high-quality far-ultraviolet and optical spectra of background QSOs and deep galaxy redshift surveys to characterize the gas density, temperature, and pressure of individual absorbing components and to resolve their internal non-thermal motions. The derived gas density spans more than three decades, from $\log (n_{\rm H}/{{\rm cm^{-3}}}) \approx -4$ to −1, while the temperature of the gas is confined in a narrow range of log (T/K) ≈ 4.3 ± 0.3. In addition, a weak anticorrelation between gas density and temperature is observed, consistent with the expectation of the gas being in photoionization equilibrium. Furthermore, decomposing the observed line widths into thermal and non-thermal contributions reveals that more than 30 per cent of the components at z ≲ 1 exhibit line widths driven by non-thermal motions, in comparison to <20 per cent found at z ≈ 2–3. Attributing the observed non-thermal line widths to intra-clump turbulence, we find that massive quenched galaxies on average exhibit higher non-thermal broadening/turbulent energy in their CGM compared to star-forming galaxies at z ≲ 1. Finally, more »

Authors:
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Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10372212
Journal Name:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume:
516
Issue:
4
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
p. 4882-4897
ISSN:
0035-8711
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
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